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Framework Shootout at the SilvaFUG Corral

Luke Bayes and Ali Mills of PatternPark really did their homework as they prepared for their recent presentation for the Silicon Valley Flex Users Group (SilvaFUG), held at Adobe’s offices in San Francisco.

They gave their assessments of 9 different frameworks and toolkits for creating Flex applications. Reviewed and ranked were Cairngorm, PureMVC, ARP, MVCS, Flest, Model-Glue: Flex, ServerBox Foundry, Guasax, and Slide. They shared their experiences with each, and ranked them based on Approachability, Flexibility and Scalability.

In order to evaluate the frameworks on an equal basis, they designed a simple task list application, and attempted to build it using each of the frameworks.

And the final verdict?

Of all 9 frameworks considered, PureMVC was ranked most approachable, flexible and scalable.

Luke Bayes writes in his follow up:

“Our conclusion was that PureMVC by Cliff Hall beats out the alternatives.

We prefer PureMVC because of:

1) Composition over inheritance

2) Liberal use of Interfaces

3) Indirection is used but not overwhelming

4) Instance members hide singleton references from application code

5) MXML views can be extremely thin

6) Benefits of Cairngorm, with few of the disadvantages.”

After delivering the findings of their investigation, the audience became very involved. A lot of good and practical questions were raised and a healthy discussion ensued. Source code for their TooDoo application written in both Cairngorm and PureMVC are available on their blog, as well as the slideshow and a streaming video recording of the presentation.

Update 2016

Looking back on the history of the PureMVC project, it’s clear that this presentation was the inflection point at which adoption began to rapidly pick up steam. Independent validation of the framework’s merits by some of the sharpest programmers in Silicon Valley led to a flurry of interest from all corners of the globe.

Since the early ’80s, my consuming passion has been programming. Today I work as a Software Architect, bringing more than 30 years of industry experience to bear on every task. My career has run the gamut from writing games in machine language for Commodore 64 and Apple II to implementation of large scale, object-oriented, enterprise applications.
In my spare time, I am an author and occasional music producer.